Posts Tagged ‘compassion’

Susan Boyle, may fame and fortune come your way faster than your cat named Pebbles can sneeze! This should trumpeted on every blog worldwide!! Watch as Susan takes the stage like a pro. Confident, steady, proud. Watch the judges (and the audience!!) sum her up, instantly putting her in the loony bin, what with those eyebrows, fizzed hair, white pumps and less-than-TV-suitable measurements. She states her case, says what song she’ll sing…

… and makes history.

Piaf herself, I assure you, would have had tears in her eyes.

Tiger, indeed.

Sorry to report that I have effectively screwed up the link. Lost it forever. YouTube should have enough material on her, however. Enjoy.

Life is an amazing process of growth. There are things you can do to heighten different aspects of any particular path you happen to find yourself upon. For one, you can take a cooking course to learn how to prepare delectable meals that are dramatically different than the standard fare that begins to become habitual after a while. Or, you can go to tantric seminars to learn how to enhance your sexual experience. (As a pertinent aside, people are now starting to realize that tending to their sexuality in the same way one attends to a program of general physical fitness directly affects the immune system, aging process (i.e. slow it down) and overall well-being in a way no amount of jogging can. Talk about saving health care costs in an effective way… this is bound to become the next big “tipping point”…) Or, you can do any type of self-betterment class, seminar, method, trip, and so on and so forth. Opportunity abounds.

You may discover – indeed I have discovered – that heightening your sensual sensitivities brings some challenges with it. This is especially true if you were sensitive to begin with. Take these few example that I have been observing:

There is a cloth towel hand-drying dispenser in the bathroom at a sports club. Do you, after drying your hands and mussing up the cloth, pull down the cloth you soiled so the next person has a fresh piece? Or do you pull down their soiled piece to be able to wipe your hands on a clean stretch? Wouldn’t you be totally disgusted if the same were true (oh, sorry, it often is!) of the toilet itself?

I wait patiently in line at a coffee shop, order, pay, and – as is the usual procedure nowadays – wait for my order to “come up.” There is a bit of eye contact communication going on with the person preparing my beverage, and she makes note of me because I’m the unusual one that has ordered soy milk. She places my cup on the little tray table counter space and makes certain I am aware this is mine. This irritates an impeccably dressed elderly woman (who was in line well after me), who believes that this particular order simply must be hers. Alas, it is not. My hand on my take-out, we make eye contact, hers fuming and hissing, mine trying to exude patience, compassion and understanding with her outright aggression toward me. Because of a cup of hot drink!

The next example is a bit more closer to home, but I feel it serves a purpose. Relationship is, in my opinion, one of the major reasons for - should we be able to, hypothetically, determine whether or not we want to do this - “manifesting” into a human body. We come down in order to rub noses with others who have done the same. That does NOT necessarily mean that it’s all twinkle-eyes and starry nights. There is stuff to be learned in conflict, to be sure. Like: how do you react when someone has a fight with you about something? We may be evolving slowly, slowly, into cultures that prefer to fight verbally as opposed to physically when engaged in 1:1 “combat” about who is responsible for taking out the garbage. Or for initiating sex. Or getting dinner together. Or responsible for what client. This list goes on, obviously.

How do you react? Can you avoid words darting out of your mouth with intent to spear someone through and through?

How do you deflect their sword attacks?

How do you process what the exchange means?

This is an essential skill, both in private and professional worlds. The great designer, the compassionate citizen, the “spiritual warrior,” the true lover should be a few steps ahead if he has learned to hone his sensibilities, if they have practiced their art. If they want to step into the responsiblity of building a sensitive, compassionate planet.

Breathing in, breathing out, feeling resentful, feeling happy, being able to drop it, not being able to drop it, eating our food, brushing our teeth, walking, sitting—whatever we’re doing could be done with one intention. That intention is that we want to wake up, we want to ripen our compassion, and we want to ripen our ability to let go, we want to realize our connection with all beings. Everything in our lives has the potential to wake us up or to put us to sleep. Allowing it to awaken us is up to us.

I do so love these blurbs some days. This one was particularly good this morning after a disastrous night. So how comfortable ARE we with uncertainty? Every day brings a bit of uncertainty, which explains weather reports, which are often useless. I love it when they all yell “rain! snow! sleet!” and I wake up to blue sky. I’m certainly compassionate about the fact that they do try to pin the weather down (pilots and hanggliders, after all, really depend up on it) and it’s a respectable field of employment.

What will wake me up today? What will put me to sleep? I’ll be taking a look at that.